Ornithological and Other Oddities 



as on our freezing estuaries ; and the whistling- 

 teal or tree-ducks flock there like their northern 

 visitors, though they are born and bred in the 

 country, which to the latter is merely an agree- 

 able winter resort. 



The winter assemblages of our titmice and 

 gold-crests find their parallels among the birds 

 of warm climates. Bates, in his admirable 

 "Naturalist on the Amazons," describes mixed 

 flocks of various birds, usually insectivorous, 

 which suddenly fill the forest with life and 

 then pass on, hunting as they go. So also in 

 India the various bush-hunting birds occasion- 

 ally form mixed flocks, which traverse the jungle 

 in company, the short-winged species hunting 

 among the vegetation and on the ground, while 

 those which take their food on the wing wait 

 to snap up the insects which escape the ground- 

 lings. A more remarkable association has been 

 observed in Africa, where a party of storks 

 was once observed hunting grasshoppers, and 

 each bearing as a rider a "large copper-coloured 

 flycatcher," which bird darted from his stork's 

 back to pursue any insect his steed had missed. 

 The flycatcher in question was probably one 

 of the beautiful red African bee-eaters, for in 

 India the little green bee-eater is commonly mis- 

 called in this way, and no doubt the same would 

 be the case with his large red African relative. 



